Alfred Bosch will be ERC’s candidate for mayor of Barcelona

  • Bosch received 55% of the vote

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11.07.2014 - 23:17

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By more than one hundred votes difference, Alfred Bosch has won the ERC primaries in the city of Barcelona. The representative for ERC in the Spanish Congress received 654 votes while Amorós got 532. Although there were two thousand five hundred delegates—counting militants, sympathizers, and friends of the party, each of whom had to pay 3 euros—who could vote, only 1189 ended up doing so.

With Jordi Portabella, ERC’s central figure in Barcelona over the last fifteen years, stepping down, the mayoral candidates for Esquerra Rebublicana de Catalunya [Republican Left of Catalonia] ended up being Oriol Amorós, member of the Catalan Parliament and Alfred Bosch, representative of ERC in the Spanish Congress. Amorós is running as the candidate who knows the city from one end to the other; Bosch as the outsider and renovator.

Twelve hours and eleven polling places

Eleven polling places—one in each city district, except Sant Martí which will have two—and three thousand ballots will be available for the delegates from 9am until 9pm. Once the polls have closed, the votes will be counted and results will be announced. The declaration of the candidate will be held tomorrow: the ERC federation in Barcelona will hold a conference to define the strategy that the municipal elections will take from this point forward.

Both candidates closed the primary campaign with calls for participation and for unity, no matter the result. During the first days of the campaign, Bosch and Amorós called on each other to join as a second in their respective lists. After both rejected the proposal of the other, they ran an intense campaign with several lively face-to-face debates.

Proposals
The candidates held their central campaign events on Sunday. In Barcelona’s Teatre Principal, Alfred Bosch said that at exceptional times, it was important to be clear about what could be achieved together. He said that “we have to set aside the ‘I’ and begin with ‘we'” because “our collective knowledge is always greater than that of one individual”. He also defended a “free and just capital of the Catalan Republic” and proposed “sewing together the two Barcelonas and rejecting two separate speeds”. More than two hundred people attended the event, and presentations were given by Josep Maria Reniu, Enric Marín, Ester Capella, Albert Castellanos, Agustí Alcoberro, and Oriol Illa.

Oriol Amorós proposed creating a sum of the leftist parties and movements in Barcelona before the municipal elections in 2015, with ERC as the foundation. He said that if he won the primaries he would begin a process called “Sumem Barcelona” [Let’s add up Barcelona] in order to gather together all of the left leaning groups that are in favor of the right to decide and a Yes-Yes vote, but also with neighborhood, union and third sector leaders. Amorós believes that the ERC candidate for mayor must spend 365 days in Barcelona and that Alfred Bosch should continue to be the “Catalan voice in Madrid”.

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